By: Alex Dobuzinskis
LOS ANGELES (REUTERS).- "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski's handwritten manifesto against industrialism, his typewriters and other items from his Montana cabin will be sold at auction to benefit his victims, authorities said on Thursday.
Kaczynski, who became one of America's most notorious criminals by killing three people and wounding 29 with homemade bombs sent by post from 1978 to 1995, had opposed the auction.
But in August, a federal judge in California approved the sale, and on Thursday the U.S. Marshals Service said it had finished plans for an online auction, to run from May 18 to June 2.
"We will use the technology that Kaczynski railed against in his various manifestoes to sell artifacts of his life," U.S. Marshal Albert Najera of the Eastern District of California said in a statement.
"The proceeds will go to his victims and, in a very small way, offset some of the hardships they have suffered," Najera said.
A total of 60 lots will be for sale in the auction, to be held at the website
www.gsaauctions.gov.
The 68 year-old Kaczynski is serving a life sentence at a federal prison in Colorado. A former mathematics professor, he withdrew from society in the early 1970s and became a modern day Luddite, with radical anti-technology views.
U.S. agents captured Kaczynski and seized his property when they raided his remote Montana cabin in 1996.
Among the items hauled out of the cabin, and included in the auction, is his original handwritten version of a manifesto mailed to the New York Times and the Washington Post in 1995.
TYPEWRITER FOR SALE
The newspapers published the 35,000-word manuscript which railed against the evils of modern technology, because Kaczynski had promised to stop his deadly attacks if either paper distributed it. At the time, the "Unabomber's" identity was still a mystery.
The sale includes the typewriter Kaczynski used to pound out the manifesto, as well as typed versions of it, Marshals Service spokeswoman Lynzey Donahue said.
There are also objects from his life in the woods, including several wooden arrows, a fishing reel, a worn pair of hiking shoes and a ball-peen hammer.
And there are several of Kaczynski's aviation-style sunglasses, which resemble those worn by a hooded suspect in a widely circulated sketch of the "Unabomber" that authorities released when they were seeking to establish his identity.
Kaczynski mounted a failed attempt in court to block the auction, and in a 2007 letter to Reuters he expressed the reasons for his opposition.
He said at the time that, instead of a sale, he wanted to make his papers available to researchers and libraries to keep his beliefs in circulation.
Syracuse University professor Robert Thompson, a pop culture expert, said the auction demonstrates the public's appetite for so-called "murderabilia" from the possessions of serial killers made famous by their crimes.
As for the "Unabomber's" manifesto, Thompson said that in today's Internet age, it could have been distributed more easily than sending an ultimatum to major newspapers.
"It's absolutely dripping with irony, and it was dripping with irony back then that anyone who eschews the efficiency of modern communication technology also depended on that technology to get that message out," Thompson said.
(Editing by Dan Whitcomb and Greg McCune)
